General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Dead Man and Being Happy

The Dead Man and Being Happy (Spanish: El muerto y ser feliz) is a 2012 Spanish-Argentine-French road movie directed by Javier Rebollo, in which a terminally ill hired assassin escapes his Buenos Aires hospital bed and drives north across Argentina with a stolen supply of morphine. It premiered in the official competition of the 60th San Sebastián International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and José Sacristán won the Silver Shell for Best Actor.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	El muerto y ser feliz; Spain, Argentina, France, 2012¹
Director and screenplay	Javier Rebollo; screenplay by Lola Mayo, Javier Rebollo, and Salvador Roselli²
Cast	José Sacristán (Santos), Roxana Blanco, Valeria Alonso, Fermí Reixach, Vicky Peña¹^•³
Runtime	94 minutes (festival listings); the ICAA Spanish film registry records 93 minutes²^•⁴
Awards	FIPRESCI Prize and Silver Shell for Best Actor (Sacristán) at San Sebastián 2012; Violeta de Oro first prize and Best Actress (Blanco) at Cinespaña Toulouse 2012; Young Public Award at Nantes 2013¹^•⁵
Spanish release and box office	Released in Spain on 28 November 2012; grossed 32,991.31 euros from 6,192 admissions⁴
Rating	Not recommended for audiences under 12 (Spanish certification)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Santos, a 75-year-old Spanish hitman who has spent half his life in Argentina, lies on the top floor of a Buenos Aires hospital with three tumours and knows he is dying. Talked into accepting one more job despite his pain and waning strength, he instead decides to run: he doses himself with morphine and sets off on a trip across Argentina, heading nowhere in particular.¹ The Spanish registry synopsis calls it "a hired killer who doesn't kill in a film with roads, dogs and guns."⁴

At a gas station he is joined by a woman (Roxana Blanco) who impulsively jumps into his vintage Ford Falcon and soon diverts him from his intended path. The journey runs through an interior Argentina rarely seen in film, from the Córdoba resort town of La Cumbrecita, with its disproportionate population of elderly Germans, to the northern province of Santiago del Estero, and includes a stop at a decrepit beach town that one of the film's dueling voice-over narrators describes as "a strange mix of paradise and apocalypse."⁶ The New York Film Festival program described the result as a playful and unexpectedly moving reverie on love, death and the open road.⁶

Style and voice-over

Rebollo builds the film as a modern chivalric romance and as an experiment in sustained voice-over, supplied by the co-screenwriter Lola Mayo, whom the director calls his spiritual twin; the narrative gradually opens into a multi-layered tale about the origin of myths.¹ Two competing narrators run through the film, and the tension between what the voice says and what the image shows is deliberate: Rebollo has described the film as a paradox that opens meaning rather than closing it, with the voice telling the viewer not to trust what is seen, and the other way around.⁷

The voice-over also had a practical origin. According to IMDb trivia, after seeing the first cut Rebollo realized that Sacristán had made the hitman far more lovable than intended, so he and Mayo recorded a constant voice-over through the whole movie to try to neutralize Santos's charm.⁸ Rebollo has called the film "a classic film made by a modern" and traces its visual language to silent cinema: Sacristán barely speaks, and the film relies on the body, space, and humor.⁷ The dogs that appear along the road were all amateurs encountered while traveling through Argentina, with the director doubling as animal trainer.⁹

Production

Rebollo (born 1969 in Madrid) worked as a news editor for Telemadrid from 1993 to 1999 and co-founded the production company Lolita Films in 1996, where he met his regular collaborator Lola Mayo.¹ The film was produced by Icónica, Lolita Films, and Eddie Saeta in Spain with Utópica Cine in Argentina and Noodles Production in France, with backing from TVE, the ICAA, the ICO, the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, and TV3.²

Rebollo wrote the role for Sacristán from the moment the setting moved from an early idea of a France-set story with Peter Coyote to Argentina; he has said the film would be inconceivable without him.¹⁰ The shoot lasted six weeks on the road plus one week in Buenos Aires, and the entire first week had to be reshot because of problems with the material, which the insurance covered.¹⁰ Rebollo has said the film was shot with the actors driving, without a camera car, with few takes and no rehearsals.¹¹

Reception

The film competed at San Sebastián in 2012, Rebollo's third consecutive film in the festival's official competition, after Lo que sé de Lola (2006) and Woman Without Piano (2009), which had won him the Silver Shell for Best Direction.¹² There it took the FIPRESCI Prize, and Sacristán received the Silver Shell for Best Actor.¹ It screened in the Main Slate of the 50th New York Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere, and was a hit at Cinespaña in Toulouse, winning the Violeta de Oro first prize and Best Actress for Roxana Blanco; it also played at BFI London 2012 and International Film Festival Rotterdam 2013, and won the Young Public Award at the Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Nantes 2013.⁶^•⁵^•¹³ Sacristán went on to receive a Goya Award nomination for the performance.⁷

Commercially the film was modest: the ICAA registry records 6,192 admissions and a Spanish gross of 32,991.31 euros.⁴ Cineuropa lists the Spanish release date as 11 January 2013, while the ICAA registry gives 28 November 2012.²^•⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026